Linux 4.2 released, Bootlin contributions inside

Linus Torvalds has released last sunday the 4.2 release of the Linux kernel. LWN.net covered the merge window of this 4.2 release cycle in 3 parts (part 1, part 2 and part 3), giving a lot of details about the new features and important changes.

In a more recent article, LWN.net published some statistics about the 4.2 development cycle. In those statistics, Bootlin appears as the 10th contributing company by number of patches with 203 patches integrated, and Bootlin engineer Maxime Ripard is in the list of most active developers by changed lines, with 6000+ lines changed. See also this page for more kernel contribution statistics.

This time around, the most important contributions of Bootlin where:

Support for Atmel ARM processors:

The effort to clean-up the arch/arm/mach-at91/ continued, now that the conversion to the Device Tree and multiplatform is completed. This was mainly done by Alexandre Belloni.

Support for the ACME Systems Arietta G25 was added by Alexandre Belloni.

Support for the RTC on at91sam9rlek was also added by Alexandre Belloni.

Significant improvements were brought to the dmaengine xdmac and hdmac drivers (used on Atmel SAMA5D3 and SAMA5D4), bringing interleaved support, memset support, and better performance for certain use cases. This was done by Maxime Ripard.

Support for Marvell Berlin ARM processors:

In preparation to the addition of a driver for the ADC, an important refactoring of the reset, clock and pinctrl driver was done by using a regmap and the syscon mechanism to more easily share the common registers used by those drivers. Worked done by Antoine Ténart.

An IIO driver for the ADC was contributed, which relies on the syscon and regmap mentioned above, as the ADC uses registers that are mixed with the clock, reset and pinctrl ones.

The Device Tree files were relicensed under GPLv2 and X11 licenses.

Support for Marvell EBU ARM processors:

A completely new driver for the CESA cryptographic engine was contributed by Boris Brezillon. This driver aims at replacing the old mv_cesa drivers, by supporting the newer features of the cryptographic engine available in recent Marvell EBU SoCs (DMA, new ciphers, etc.). The driver is backward compatible with the older processors, so it will be a full replacement for mv_cesa.

A big cleanup/verification work was done on the pinctrl drivers for Armada 370, 375, 38x, 39x and XP, leading to a number of fixes to pin definitions. This was done by Thomas Petazzoni.

Support for the AXP22x PMIC was added by Boris Brezillon, including the support for the regulators provided by this PMIC. This PMIC is used on a significant number of Allwinner designs.

A small number of Device Tree files were relicensed under GPLv2 and X11 licenses.

A big cleanup of the Device Tree files was done by using more aggressively the “DT label based syntax”

A new driver, sunxi_sram, was added to support the SRAM memories available in some Allwinner processors.

RTC subsystem:

As was announced recently, Bootlin engineer Alexandre Belloni is now the co-maintainer of the RTC subsystem. He has set up a Git repository at https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/abelloni/linux.git/ to maintain this subsystem. During the 4.2 release cycle, 46 patches were merged in the drivers/rtc/ directory: 7 were authored by Alexandre, and all other patches (with the exception of two) were merged by Alexandre, and pushed to Linus.